The Late Music of Morton Feldman: A Mini-festival/Symposium
Photo of Morton Feldman: Leo Smit, courtesy University at Buffalo Music Library
Presented by Pitt's Department of Music and its contemporary chamber music series, Music on the Edge, and the Arts and Sciences Faculty Research and Scholarship Program.
Organized by Amy Williams, Assistant Professor of Composition/Theory.
Pitt’s Department of Music and its contemporary chamber music series Music on the Edge will present a two-day mini-festival and symposium celebrating the late music of Morton Feldman. Two concerts, each exploring a separate Feldman work, will take place at Wood Street Galleries on the evening of November 3rd and 4th, and a day-long symposium, comprising scholars from around the country and musicians who worked closely with Feldman, will take place at Pitt’s Music Building on November 4.
The works of Morton Feldman (1926-1987) occupy a central place in the American experimental tradition, not just within the music world. Feldman was very often inspired by non-musical sources, including Persian rugs, abstract expressionist paintings by Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston, and texts of Samuel Beckett, John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara. Kyle Gann remarked that, “in the current Babel of musical styles, Feldman is almost the only composer whose music appeals across stylistic boundaries, among minimalists, postserialists, 12-tone holdouts, electronic composers, academics, Downtowners, MAX programmers, DJ artists, and other miscellaneous wastrels.” Why does this music have such a broad appeal? This is one of the questions that will be explored during the one-day symposium on Feldman’s late music. The first session will include scholars whose research places Feldman within a larger historical context. The second session will call upon performers and composers who worked intimately with Feldman in the 1970s and 1980s. The symposium will be framed by two concerts presenting two late chamber pieces, Patterns in a Chromatic Field and Crippled Symmetry.
This celebration of Feldman’s musical legacy comes to Pittsburgh via another legacy—the one passed from percussionist Jan Williams to his daughter, composer/pianist Amy Williams. Jan Williams premiered many of Feldman’s works, while Amy Williams is a widely performed and commissioned composer and one half of the critically acclaimed Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo. The father/daughter duo first performed Crippled Symmetry in Buffalo in April 2011 and Amy Williams, a member of the composition and theory faculty at Pitt, is the driving force behind the two-day exploration of Feldman’s work. Jan and Amy Williams will be joined be Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble flutist Lindsey Goodman, and University of Buffalo faculty member Jonathan Golove on cello.
In keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of Feldman’s inspiration, the two concerts will take place at Wood Street Galleries rather than a traditional concert venue, and feature readings by Jan Beatty, poet and host of WYEP’s Prosody, and Lynn Emmanuel, poet and Professor of English at Pitt.
View the Complete Symposium Schedule
Concerts at Wood Street Galleries
